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Details of bacterial 'injection' system revealed
Date:4/26/2009

UPTON, NY New details of the composition and structure of a needlelike protein complex on the surface of certain bacteria may help scientists develop new strategies to thwart infection. The research, conducted in part at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, will be published April 26, 2009, in the advance online edition of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The scientists were studying a needlelike protein complex known as a "type III secretion system," or T3SS, on the surface of Shigella bacteria, a cause of dysentery. The secretion system is a complex protein structure that traverses the bacterial cell membrane and acts as a biological syringe to inject deadly proteins into intestinal cells. These proteins rupture the cell's innards, leading to bloody diarrhea and sometimes death. Similar secretion systems exist in a range of other infectious bacteria, including those that cause typhoid fever, some types of food poisoning, and plague.

"Understanding the 3D structure of these secretion proteins is important for the design of new broad-spectrum strategies to combat bacterial infections," said study co-author Joseph Wall, a biophysicist at Brookhaven Lab.

Previous studies of the type III secretion system have revealed that it is composed of some 25 different kinds of proteins assembled into three major parts: a "bulb" that lies within the bacterial cell, a region spanning the inner and outer bacterial membranes, and a hollow, largely extracellular "needle." But to understand how the parts work together to secrete proteins, the scientists required higher-resolution structural information, and knowledge of the chemical makeup and arrangement of the components.

Using a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), the scientists have now revealed new details of the "needle complex" structure.

"STEM and the other technique
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Contact: Karen McNulty Walsh
kmcnulty@bnl.gov
631-344-8350
DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory
Source:Eurekalert

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